The US election result has been a triumph for the nerds, with pollsters outdoing pundits by predicting the correct outcome weeks in advance.

It was meant to be the closest US presidential election in more than half a century.

According to pundits, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were on a knife's edge - the race was too close to call, and the election count could take weeks.

So the great majority of America's political experts spent the day wondering how their predictions fell so wide of the mark.

But not everyone missed it.

Polling data analysts with a background in complex maths, rather than realpolitik, pored over poll after poll, to not only pick the winner and the margins, but to arrive at the correct result weeks before voters hit the polling booths.

It has started a debate over who really knows politics best: the political pundits or the pollsters.

At just after 3:15pm (AEDT) on Wednesday, major US network CNN called the US election for Mr Obama.

ABC and Fox News called the election at much the same time, but immediately the pundits on Fox challenged the network's own number-crunching decision desk.

In particular, senior Republican adviser during George W Bush's administration, Karl Rove, was having nothing to do with Fox News's call in giving Ohio and the presidency to Mr Obama.

"I don't know what the outcome is going to be, but you should - we got to be careful about calling things when we have, like, 991 votes separating the two candidates and a quarter of the vote yet to count," he said.

A Fox News anchor headed to the decision desk room to quiz the mathematicians on their call.

They patiently explained why the network's own pundits, including Mr Rove, were wrong.

"The historical trend is so strong, and the polling is so strong, about how Democratic these counties are. No matter what the handful of Republican precincts that are still out there are, it's just not going to make it," a Fox News statistician said.

The rise of the pollsters and the fall of the pundits has been happening over the past few US election cycles, but after this week's election, with its remarkable polling accuracy, no longer it seems will it be enough to go with the gut, reporting what anonymous party sources think or taking a general vibe of the electorate.

Mr Silver is by no means the only one to crunch all the polls into one easily digestible graph - he is just the best-known because of his analytical talent and because he successfully solved the idea that numbers and maths could replace the reporting of opinion and partisan commentary.

Another person that took the US polling data, crunched it all and made predictions was Professor Simon Jackman.

"A lot of pundits, particularly those leaning right of centre, said: 'This is garbage and you can't trust these polls, and who is this guy?', and in the end, those of us who were working with the data have had the last laugh.

"It's not just that we kind of got it right, we got it absolutely right."

'Spot on'

Professor Jackman is from the Department of Political Science at Stanford University and published his models, graphs and analysis for news website The Huffington Post.

"Since about 2000, the 2000 presidential election, polling companies have understood that the main game in American presidential elections are state polls because of the Electoral College rule in the US," he said.

"It's not the popular vote that matters, it's do you win enough states to win a majority of the Electoral College?

"So starting from about 2000 onwards, there's been more and more state-level polling and more and more of us have been attracted to, can we make state-by-state predictions given the ever-increasing amount of poll data that are out there?"

Professor Jackman says his predictions were spot on.

"What I had was in the end that Romney would only take two states back from Obama's 2008 haul of states, and the two states we predicted Romney would take would be Indiana and North Carolina, and we had Florida absolutely coin flip at the end of the campaign," he said.

"As it turns out, that's the actual result - that the only two states Romney took from Obama were Indiana and North Carolina.

"Florida is still out there - we called it barely for Obama and right now it is barely hanging in there, Obama ahead in the ongoing vote count there that'll take a couple of days or maybe longer to sort out.

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